176 MODES OF RESEARCH IN GENETICS 



father or not. A variety of oats takes its place 

 in the world by virtue of its own inherent qualities, 

 with no questions asked about forebears or the 

 orthodoxy of their marital relations. Both aris- 

 tocracies and democracies have their advantages 

 and their disadvantages as social systems. These 

 merits and defects are just as real and effective 

 in their operation whether the ultimate vital unit 

 of the system be a man, a cow, or an oat plant. 



Owing to the essentially different conditions and 

 methods of work which obtain in plant breeding, 

 this field is able to reap more direct benefits of a 

 practical character from the advances which 

 have been made in the science of genetics, than in 

 animal breeding. In the creation of new races by 

 hybridization the plant breeder can and does take 

 Mendelian principles as a direct and immediate 

 guide. He has made Mendelism a working tool 

 of his craft. 



To conclude : What I have tried to do in this 

 paper is to discuss the relation between the science 

 of genetics and the practical art of breeding as 

 they actually have developed and now exist. At- 

 tention has been directed to the obvious fact that 

 animal breeding has, without the aid of genetic 

 science, attained an extremely high level of achieve- 

 ment. Empirical methods can only have been 

 successful when they were fundamentally in accord 

 with natural laws, and it is therefore not to be con- 

 sidered surprising that the recent discoveries of 



